A new urgency on Earth Day

THE FIRST Earth Day was organized in 1970 in response to a period that had seen one ecological disaster after another. One of the most frightening had come the year before--the devastating Santa Barbara oil spill caused by a blowout on a Union Oil drilling platform just six miles off the coast of Southern California.

This Friday, Earth Day will mark the one-year anniversary of the BP oil disaster, another product of an offshore drilling platform blowout, which continues to ruin Gulf of Mexico ecosystems, as well as the livelihoods of people who live along the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, halfway around the globe, the catastrophe at Japan's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant is far from over.

These two contemporary events show the urgent need for a new environmental movement--and the ingredients for such a movement can be seen in the grassroots struggles that have emerged across the U.S. in response to environmental destruction, just as they did four decades ago.

THE PROTESTS that took place on April 22, 1970, including a march on Washington and as many as 1,500 teach-ins and protests on campuses across the country, reflected the radicalization of the preceding decade--the era of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's rights movement, and the civil rights and Black Power struggles--as well as an understanding that mass action was needed at the grassroots level if there was going to be significant change.

Activists shone a light on the government's complicity with Corporate America--the ugly truth that the biggest names in big business were allowed to pollute the air and water, and poison their workers with pesticides and workplace toxins.

The growing protests against corporate polluters running wild prompted the person least likely to support environmental regulations--Republican President Richard Nixon--to do just that. In his 1970 State of the Union address, Nixon declared:

The great question of the '70s is: Shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?...

We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness, we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.

Yes, you read that correctly--those words came from Richard Nixon, the man who spared no expense devastating Vietnam and its people in a shower of bombs and Agent Orange defoliant.

Faced with an upsurge from below, the warmonger and crook became the environmental president. Reforms enacted during the Nixon administration included the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Over the next few decades, though, both the environmental regulations and the powers of the new agencies were eroded by Republican and Democratic administrations alike, as deregulation became the mantra of successive White Houses, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton.

Corporations painted themselves as "green" while passing responsibility for environmental destruction onto working people--multimillion-dollar p.r. campaigns were designed to divert attention from corporate pollution and onto individuals and their consumption "choices."

This Earth Day, we face an aggressive assault on all that remains of the Nixon-era regulations--spearheaded by congressional Republicans who are proposing $1.6 billion in cuts to funding for the EPA, all in the name of fiscal responsibility and balancing the budget.

As for the Democrats, Nixon looks like a radical environmental crusader by comparison. The Obama administration is attempting to reverse what for decades had been considered commonsense environmental policies, embracing the deadly troika of nuclear energy, "clean" coal and offshore oil drilling.

Three recent disasters--the crisis at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant, BP's Deepwater Horizon spill, and the explosion at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia a year ago this month--show the folly of the administration's energy schemes.

All of this is leading some activists who supported Barack Obama in 2008 and worked to get out the vote for him to question the administration's actual commitment to the environment. As Kelsea Norris, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Georgia who attended the Power Shift 2011 conference in Washington, D.C., last weekend, told the Chicago Tribune:

We came out in 2008 and we voted for Obama and we worked our butts off and we organized. Young people elected him, right? And he hasn't stepped up in the way we thought he was going to. Truth is, in 2012, if he doesn't turn his energy policies around, we're not going to be organizing for him. We're not going to be knocking on doors.

Said Brandon Knight, another Power Shift attendee: "People are starting to come face to face with the reality that [Obama] isn't going to be what we thought he was going to be. Maybe he isn't going to change things."

THE SENSE that organizing has to start now is beginning to be expressed in local organizing--among new activists as well as veterans of the movement.

Last weekend's Power Shift conference in Washington was a sign of the sentiment on a national level--more than 10,000 young activists converged for a conference focused on addressing climate change and promoting clean-energy alternatives.

There are many more examples at the local level. In Vermont last month, protesters gathered at the gates of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in solidarity with the people of Japan--and to demand that their nightmare-waiting-to-happen-at-home be shut down. The 40-year campaign to close Vermont Yankee, which is reported to have leaked radioactive tritium into local groundwater, recently got a boost when state lawmakers under pressure from the movement voted to deny the nuclear plant an extension on its operations.

Meanwhile, over the last few years, protests have been on the rise against the destruction of Appalachia's mountains by the coal industry's mountaintop removal extraction--with militant demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience, including activists chaining themselves to Massey Energy bulldozers.

In Pennsylvania and New York, community members are organizing to oppose "fracking"--the energy industry's practice of hydraulic fracturing, in which water, sand and chemicals are injected into the ground at high pressure to release natural gas deposits. Fracking has caused toxic pollution and contamination of drinking water.

Smaller struggles are being waged by local activists taking on companies that pollute and poison their communities--such as Chicago's largely Latino Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods, where residents are demanding that two nearby coal-fired power plants reduce emissions, or be shut down.

Community members, who report high asthma rates for people who live closer to the plants, rightly point out that the power companies' disregard for their health is a result of racism and class inequality. The average income in the three-mile radius around the Crawford plant in Little Village is just $11,097 per capita, and 83.9 percent of the population is non-white.

And in Oregon and Idaho, environmental activists and Native American groups are organizing against the transportation of huge pieces of equipment to be used in the construction of a new tar sands refinery in Alberta, Canada.

The heavy loads, with trucks transporting machinery weighing 650,000 pounds, present an ecological danger in transit--and activists are standing in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in Canada who will suffer the terrible effects of further tar sand extraction and processing.

Demands for an end to corporations running roughshod over the environment and workers' health and safety go hand in hand with the fights emerging to stop political leaders from trying to make working people pay for the economic crisis.

For example, in Wisconsin--where workers and students took a stand against union-busting and austerity--it's obvious that the Republicans' agenda of putting the interests of big business first apply on every front, from the scapegoating of public-sector workers to the relaxation of environmental regulations.

It's profitable to pollute--that's a fact of life about capitalism that corporate executives and their political servants understand all too well. That's why the struggle to defend working-class living standards against attacks by big business and government has to include efforts to defend our environment from the corporations that make money by wrecking it.